Development [LWN.net]

DisTract - the Distributed Bug Tracker

Matthew Sackman recently announced the DisTract Distributed Bug Tracker project, which aims to decentralize bug tracking:

We're all now familiar with working with distributed software control systems, such as Monotone, Git, Darcs, Mercurial and others, but bug trackers still seem to be fully stuck in the centralised model: Bugzilla and Trac both have single centralised servers. This is clearly wrong, as if you're able to work on the Train, off the network and still perform local commits of code then surely you should also be able to locally close bugs too. DisTract allows you to manage bugs in a distributed manner through your web-browser.

The project is still in the early phases of its development, basic features are still being added: "Currently, there are two major features missing. The first is bug listings. The links to List Bugs at the top of each page will go nowhere. This should be implemented quite quickly. The other major feature is dealing with merging."

DisTract is being released under the 3-clause BSD license. The software has been written in the Haskell language and takes advantage of several open-source packages. The movement of bugs across the net is handled by Monotone, a distributed version control system and the Markdown text-to-HTML conversion tool is used for working with bug descriptions and comments. DisTract defines bug information with its Bug Fields. Three field types have been defined: free form fields are for basic bug descriptions, simple lists are for keeping track of things like bug revision histories and graphs are for tracking the state of bugs.

Release 0.1.1 of DisTract came out after the original announcement, it focuses on building the code: "This version has no new features other than the fact that it actually compiles in a sane way which no longer requires endless amounts of jiggery-pokery. This has been achieved by improving the hinstaller module which DisTract depends on. Thus for all of you who downloaded the source tarball of version 0.1 and were then deeply alarmed by the compilation instructions, fear not. The Compilation page is now, correspondingly, simpler!"

DisTract is available for download here.

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